One of the things that we, as marketers, are always trying to figure out is ‘What is the best way to measure the return of investment (ROI) of a sponsorship?’

With the new and exciting advantages of digital, things have become easier in the form that we now have sufficient tools, which enable us to efficiently measure the way our brand is being activated surrounding an event, team or athlete that we are sponsoring.

However, understanding the ROI that we want to take for our brand, must drive us to the key points of any sponsorship deal. These key points include: What do we want to achieve with it? Does it build brand awareness, build brand preference and loyalty or simply increase sales and market share?

By defining what our objectives are, we should then be able to put in place a ROI model that fits those purposes. If we think of a model to track a digital sponsorship, I would suggest:

–> Mediatic Return

Focus on mediatic return on the media: work with a partner (or develop it internally) that allows you to track and attribute a monetary value to each piece of content that you find on the web, such as articles, interviews, news and so on.

The idea is for you to understand how much you would have to pay if you were investing money yourself to have those newspapers and bloggers writing and speaking about your brand. Instead, you sponsor someone or something that will get you that exposure, so you can immediately measure the mediatic return and awareness that your sponsored event/team/athlete is getting for you.

Every link your sponsored event/team/athlete shares on the web must be developed/created in order for you to track what each click means for your business, namely the traffic profile of your leads to your website, and at the same time understand how many people have converted in your e-commerce platform (if you have one).

–> Engagement

Measure engagement on your third party platforms, such as social media. Here you have plenty of tools and ways to track if your sponsorship deal is having enough engagement or not, this includes the number of likes, comments, mentions, shares, tweets, retweets and so on.

The fact that we can measure our ROI in a model that helps us reach our business objectives, this gives us the opportunity to better select the events, teams or athletes in which we are going to invest in the future. This also means that we are continuously improving the way we activate our brand.